Waitangi Day: Shakespeare's sonnets in Maori

Today is Waitangi Day, a significant day in the history of New Zealand.

Mareike Doleschal
06 Feb 2017

Waitangi Day commemorates the signing of New Zealand most important historic document Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) by representatives of the British Crown and Maori tribes. To mark Waitangi Day, I decided to blog about our translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets into Maori.

Merimeri Penfold, a renowned
teacher of Maori and human rights activist, presented her translation to our
library. She autographed the title
page and added a few words in Maori: “Ken nga rangatira Hekepia” which means “To
the guardians of Shakespeare.”

Translating Shakespeare into
Maori is a huge challenge but Penfold rose to it. Sixty four years of teaching
Maori and editing dictionaries of her native tongue must have equipped her with
the experience and knowledge to tackle this task. In her preface she describes
the linguistic difficulties she encountered and how she overcame them: “The
exercise was a challenging and demanding one. The elaborately contrived form of
the sonnet, with its tight structure, complicated rhyme-scheme, and delicate
metrical patterning, proved difficult to adapt to the conventions of Maori
composition and to the natural energies of the language. I therefore chose to
concentrate on the nuances of meaning in each poem, rather than attempting to
find an exact equivalent for its formal characteristics.”

Penfold passed away in 2014.
There are many heartfelt obituaries on the internet describing the loss of a much
loved woman who achieved so much in the fields of linguistics and Maori rights.
She was the first university teacher of the Maori language, a contributor to
the seventh edition of a dictionary of the Maori language, the first female
Maori university lecturer, a Human Rights Commissioner, a member of the Maori
Education Foundation and last but not least the first translator of nine
Shakespeare’s sonnets into Maori.

The cover of this slim
volume shows a transformed Droushout portrait of Shakespeare: his face is
partially covered in Maori face paint, he wears a spear-like earring and around
his neck he seems to be wearing a necklace made of shells. It is one of the
most unusual and intriguing portraits of Shakespeare I have ever seen and a
great visual introduction to the linguistic journey the book contains.

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